Apple has patched a total of nine vulnerabilities with the release of QuickTime 7.7.8 for Windows.
According to an advisory published by Apple last week, the update addresses a series of memory corruption issues that can lead to the unexpected termination of the application or arbitrary code execution.
Ryan Pentney and Richard Johnson of Cisco Talos, a researcher known as “WalkerFuz,” experts from Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs, and Apple’s own security team have been credited for finding the vulnerabilities. The following CVE identifiers have been assigned to the flaws: CVE-2015-3788, CVE-2015-3789, CVE-2015-3790, CVE-2015-3791, CVE-2015-3792, CVE-2015-5751, CVE-2015-5779, CVE-2015-5785, CVE-2015-5786.
The vulnerabilities found by Apple, WalkerFuz, and five of the six issues identified by Cisco were also patched on August 13 in the OS X version of QuickTime 7.
An advisory published by Cisco reveals that the issues reported by Talos researchers are denial-of-service (DoS) flaws that can be exploited with the aid of specially crafted .MOV files.
The security bugs are caused by invalid URL atom size, invalid 3GPP stsd sample description entry size, invalid mhdv atom size, esds atom descriptor type length mismatch, mdat corruption, and tkhd atom matrix corruption.
“Several memory corruption vulnerabilities exist in Apple Quicktime and can manifest themselves due to improper handling of objects in memory. An adversary who crafts a specifically formatted .MOV file can cause Quicktime to terminate unexpectedly, creating a local denial of service condition,” Cisco’s Talos group wrote in a blog post.
Earlier this month, Apple patched well over 100 vulnerabilities with the release of updates for OS X, OS X Server, iOS and Safari. Shortly after the updates were made available, an Italian researcher revealed the existence of a new local privilege escalation zero-day vulnerability that affects all versions of OS X Yosemite.
The expert had not informed Apple before publishing a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit, but the vendor might be aware of the issue considering that it has been patched in the beta version of OS X 10.11, dubbed El Capitan.
Local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in OS X can be very dangerous. One of the flaws fixed earlier this month with the release of OS X 10.10.5 had been exploited in the wild to install adware on Macs after a researcher disclosed its existence before Apple could release a patch.
